“The attacks by those rogue Mystiks didn’t help,” I said.
“No, they didn’t.” Nana examined another vial. “Conemar was one of the wizards who wanted the separation. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was behind the attacks as a way to scare the havens into closing off the covens. The Wizard Council shut down Conemar’s movement in 1938 just after Gian’s death…or rather, disappearance.”
Conemar had tried to kill Gian, but my great-grandfather had escaped through a trap into one of the Somniums, only to die during the battle on my front lawn.
“Okay,” I said, wanting to move past the memory of Gian. “So when do I go?”
She retrieved supplies off the shelf: gloves, syringes, tourniquet, vials, alcohol pads, and gauze. “We’ll test the cure on a volunteer first. Make sure it works. If it doesn’t, there’s no reason for you to go. When it’s time to leave, I’ll come for you.”
Nana slipped on the gloves. “Have a seat.”
“What about Afton?” I sat on one of the lab chairs at the counter.
“I told her we were heading out soon,” Emily said. “She wanted to stay and aid Nana. Doesn’t want to leave the eight-year-olds. Been mothering them ever since we got here.”
That didn’t surprise me. Afton loved kids. Whenever I needed someone to take over a babysitting gig for me, she’d step in. Actually, sometimes she would join me to help and not even want half the pay. But I couldn’t leave her. It was another realm, after all. What if she got stuck and couldn’t return to the human world?
Nana’s face softened with an understanding smile as she tied the tourniquet tightly around my arm. “I’ll watch over Afton. She’ll be safe with me.”
The needle gleamed against the light coming from the ceiling. A surge of anxiety hit me, and I shuddered.
Emily grasped my hand. “Here. Squeeze my hand if you want. It’s just a prick. Won’t even hurt that bad.”
I smiled at her. When I’d first met Emily, I thought she was an evil bitch. It wasn’t her fault. She had been controlled to do the horrible things she did to me. Her kindness toward me, and the whole taking care of me while I was hurt thing, showed she was trying to make amends. She was growing on me.
As for leaving Afton here—though I’ve never seen her do it, and I definitely never wanted to witness it, Nana was skilled in the magic of Incantora, which gave her the power to make a person erupt in flames and burn from the inside out. She never let me down all my seventeen years, and I was confident she’d give her life for Afton. Knowing that didn’t settle the worry bubbling inside me.
Morta came into the lab. Behind her, two men guided a rolling bed with an older man lying on the mattress. There were sores around the faery’s mouth, and his face was flushed with a fever.
The needle pierced my skin, and I flinched, clenching my teeth. Nana filled a vial with blood. After the third tube, my stomach got queasy. Morta must have noticed and, using her cane for support, brought me a glass with a vibrant red liquid inside.
I took the glass from her. “What is this?”
“Fruit juice from berries that grow here in the Fey realm.” She hobbled to a nearby chair and eased herself down on it.
Nana carried the vials holding my blood over to a worktable with flasks and other glass containers, along with an apparatus I didn’t recognize, a microscope, and miscellaneous lab equipment. She snapped on some rubber gloves and picked up one of the vials with my blood. Morta brought her a beaker from another glass refrigerator.
“What’s that big metal tank over there for?” Emily asked, spinning around on the stool.
Morta glanced at it. “That’s to do a bigger batch of the cure. We’ll use it to make a vaccine later.”
Nana picked up one of the vials of my blood and poured some into the beaker. My blood swirled in the clear liquid as she mixed it with a glass stirrer. She put some of the cocktail into a small bottle and screwed on a rubber top. Morta handed her a syringe. Nana took it, punctured the rubber with the needle, and pulled back the plunger, filling the barrel with the mixture.
“Shall we see if this works? We don’t want to keep our volunteer waiting.” She held the syringe, needle up, and carried it over to the sick man on the table. I looked away as she shot him up with the stuff.
Emily hopped off the stool. “Now what?”
Nana removed the rubber gloves and tossed them onto the worktable. “We wait and see if the patient gets better.”
“How long will that take?” I asked.
“A night, possibly,” Morta said. “That is, if it works as the other cure had.” Morta’s cane hit the floor as she shuffled across the floor. Thud-scrape, thud-scrape, thud-scrape. She was out of breath by the time she reached the patient. “You may return him to the infirmary,” she said to the two men attending him.
“Can we try the cure on Dag?” I asked, remembering his hopeful eyes. “He’s bad, and I’m worried he’ll …” Die. I couldn’t say that word for fear of making it come true.
Nana pushed a strand of her silver hair away from her face. “Once we see how our volunteer does, we’ll give it to him right away.”
When the men had left, Nana leaned against the counter in front of me. “I believe we have something else concerning to discuss. Afton mentioned your magic changed. You were able to create a fire, ice, and stun globe.”
The nightmare of the incident in New York ripped through me like a jagged knife. “After I’d killed the Sentinels with Veronique that day in New York, I think I absorbed their globes.”
“That is curious.” Nana went over to several books lined on one of the shelves against the wall. The spines were old and tattered and in a foreign language. She pulled one out and flipped through the pages.
Emily and I exchanged confused looks.
“Nana, what are you looking for?”
She stopped on a page and ran her finger down the length as she read. “This is one of the Fey’s medical books. There’s a section on Sentinels. I know there was something about power transfer in here. Now, where was it?”
Power transfer? That must have been what happened.
Nana cleared her throat. “It says here that in cases where there is a longer Sentinel gene strand, the subject may attract power when he or she kills another Sentinel. When the power leaves the body of the dead, the dominant Sentinel absorbs it.”
“Has this happened before?” I asked.
“Yes. It was a regular occurrence in the beginning when the Fey created the Sentinels, before they had found the correct mix of wizard blood in the formula.”
“What else does that book say about us?”
“It mentions that the Fey chose to create Sentinels from a mixture of human and wizard DNA,” Nana said. “They wanted their magical knights to have an affinity for both worlds. They send the magical mixture out into both worlds every eight years. It seeks fetuses with a rare genetic mutation from both worlds and infuses the unborn with the magic. Once the babies are delivered, its match grows in the Garden of Life.”